David Kline Wins Fairfax County Volunteer Service Award

Takes home cruise for two from Cabot Creamery

David Kline, a Fairfax County volunteer and a Fairfax County Department of Transportation employee, was doubly honored at the 23rd Annual Fairfax County Volunteer Service Awards celebration held recently at the Waterford at Springfield. He not only won the 2015 Fairfax County Volunteer Service Award for Fairfax County at an awards breakfast, but also, as a special bonus, Kline is being honored by Cabot Creamery Cooperative to sail on their 2015 “Community Celebrity Award Cruise”

The 1,200 farm families located throughout New England and Upstate New York who own Cabot have developed several innovative programs to reward volunteers out of respect to the role Cabot dairy farm families play in their communities. The Cabot Community Celebrity Cruise Award is one of those programs and it is designed to help redefine what ‘true’ celebrity really means. It’s selfless volunteers who give of their time, money ideas and energy to make their communities better places to live and work. The Celebrity Award brings like-minded volunteers from across the nation together to relax, network, share ideas, re-energize and then do more good for the non-profits and communities they serve.

Through a partnership with Fairfax County Office of Public Private Partnerships (OP3) and Samaritan Technologies, the top volunteer for Fairfax County and a guest will join other community celebrities and Cabot staffers aboard Celebrity Cruises Reflection on an 8-day/7-night all-expense paid Caribbean Cruise in November. This will be the fifth year the farmer-owners of Cabot Creamery Cooperative have honored the achievements and contributions of volunteers from every part of our great nation.” “We were pleased that our partners at Samaritan and Cabot shared this opportunity with our volunteer,” said Patricia Stevens, OP3 Executive Director.

David was honored for his volunteer service with the Juvenile Domestic Relations Court. During business hours he works for Fairfax County as a Transportation Engineer keeping traffic down and planning community projects. Since 2007 on evenings and weekends, however, he volunteers for the Stronger Together Supervised Visitation and Supervised Exchange Program working with families as a visitation monitor. David was nominated this year for his work mentoring a young father who was court ordered into the program for visitation with his toddler. David went the extra mile seeking out additional training so that he could effectively mentor the young man. David taught this young father the importance of supervising a toddler, how to change a diaper, the joy of sitting on the floor to play and modeled the gift of reading to his child. The family was grateful for David’s support, and even the judge commended his work with this young father.

The Fairfax County Volunteer Service Awards, established in 1993, are presented each year by Volunteer Fairfax and the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors. The awards serve as a community-wide celebration of volunteerism. There are many opportunities to make a difference in your community. Learn more about volunteering for Fairfax County at www.FairfaxCounty.gov/volunteering or at www.volunteerfairfax.org.

Who is Cabot?

Cabot Creamery Cooperative has been in continuous operation in Vermont since 1919, when just 94 farmers founded Cabot, each contributing $5 per cow and a cord of wood to join the cooperative. Famously known as “Makers of The World’s Best Cheddar,” the Cabot cooperative today includes 1,200 farm families located throughout New England and Upstate New York. As a cooperative, 100% of the profits go to Cabot’s dairy farm families.

Cabot has won every major national and international award for taste and quality, including “World’s Best Cheddar” at the 2012 World Championship Cheese contest, for an unprecedented second time, and Grand Champion at the 2012 American Cheese Society Awards.

The cooperative produces a full line of dairy products including traditional, as well as light and flavored cheddar, Greek-style yogurt, cottage cheese, butter and sour cream.

Cabot is the world’s first cheese maker and dairy cooperative to achieve B Corporation Certification, a third-party validation of its attention to the environment and social impacts on its stakeholders.

What is Reward Volunteers?

Reward Volunteers is a free, easy way to track the time you spend volunteering in your community and to earn rewards for your contributions. The program launched on February 14, 2012 as a mobile app that enabled volunteers to log and track their volunteer time and to post their activities via Facebook to let people know about their good deeds, and to encourage others to do the same. Since then, more than 213,000 hours have been logged by more than 3,180 selfless volunteers, to the benefit of nearly 3,000 organizations improving lives and communities and inspiring friends on Facebook to do good.

Now in its sixth iteration, Reward Volunteers 6.0 launched on April 14 and marks the program’s transition from a mobile app to a web-based program that can be accessed by any web-enabled device including smartphones, tablets, PCs and Mac-based devices. RV 6.0 is bigger, brighter, faster and easier to use than ever before! Volunteers can track their hours and post their activities to Facebook. The more hours accrued and the more sharing that occurs, the more chances volunteers have to win prizes, and the more chances organizations have to win money.

The farm families who own Cabot truly believe that volunteering makes the world a better place. Cabot’s farmers serve as volunteer firefighters, volunteer at food banks and soup kitchens, lead volunteer cleanup efforts to protect the environment and improve the quality of lives in the communities they live, work and serve, and much more. Recognizing and honoring volunteers all across our great nation comes as naturally to our farmers as does making “The World’s Best Cheddar.”

To learn more about Reward Volunteers 6.0 and how you can win great prizes for yourself, and cash for the non-profit organizations you serve, visit http://rewardvolunteers.coop.

Why did Cabot partner with Samaritan?

Jen Neary, Director of Creative Services states, “Cabot chose Samaritan to help enhance its new Reward Volunteers 6.0 web-based platform because Samaritan not only understands software & technology, but the company was built upon providing volunteer program managers with state-of-the-art tools and solutions to maximize the impact that volunteers have in the communities they serve. Cabot’s Reward Volunteers program reaches tens of thousands of volunteers nationwide, and we needed a powerful but easy-to-use platform that would take our tool to the next level. Reward Volunteers 6.0 users will now use this web based tool to log and track their time, report out via social channels, and win great prizes and cash for themselves and the non-profit organizations they serve. Samaritan helped Cabot seamlessly transition from a mobile app to a full-blown web-based program that empowers users to easily keep track of their volunteer efforts from virtually any web-enabled device and provides organizations greater reporting capabilities so they can better understand their volunteers. In short, Samaritan understands our program needs because they are passionate about volunteerism – and so is Cabot.”

How did the project go?

Jan continued, “Project process was well organized and delivered on time. Samaritan was great to work with and met our expectations in the transfer of an iPhone App/Web Widget based program to a Responsive Website utilizing their volunteer software making our program available to more consumers. We had weekly calls in order to stay on track and organized.

What did Cabot and Samaritan Learn from the process?

“To my understanding, Cabot’s site is the first to be consumer focused, which did create some road blocks”, said Jen. “The programmers at Samaritan took on these challenges and provided some alternatives, but we do still have some challenges which we will continue to work through.

What’s next?

Cabot will highlight the winning Cabot Rewards Fairfax County Volunteer in their June e-Blast, which will reach 9,000 volunteers across the country.